ABSTRACT

THE work of any great author is conditioned-apart from his talent-by his personality on the one hand, and by the age in which he lives on the other. The proportion between the two varies. So does the immediate effect of his writings. The deeper and more complicated his personality, the more is he likely to strike his own contemporaries as something puzzling or even disturbing, especially when he defies the conventional notions of his epoch. Hence the jungle of contradictory judgments, passed on Dostoevsky. The bitterest of them all is perhaps the one expressed by the critic Strakhov in a letter he wrote to Tolstoy soon after Dostoevsky's death. 'I cannot consider Dostoevsky either a good or a happy man,' he says. 'He was wicked, envious, vicious, and he spent the whole of his life in emotions and irritations which would have made him pitiable, even ridiculous, had he not been so wicked and so intelligent .... In Switzerland he treated his servant, in my presence, so abominably that the latter cried out, offended: "I too am a human being." ... Naturally, he more often offended people in order not to be offended by them, but the most terrible thing about it was that he enjoyed it and never acknowledged his villainies to the end.'